


A Girl Named Luke

by Penstrokes_and_Daydreams



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Female! Luke Skywalker, Gen, Genderbend, Pre- A New Hope, Two Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25062265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penstrokes_and_Daydreams/pseuds/Penstrokes_and_Daydreams
Summary: Luke Skywalker's past and future, before she becomes the galaxy's new hope or its last Jedi, when she's just a girl, staring at the suns.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. Part 1

Luke Skywalker exists in a state of paradox. Too old to act so childish, too young to be making such wild decisions. Too clever for her own good, too stupid to plan things out. Too skilled, too distracted to use it. Smothered by family, but a lonely orphan. The harvests come so slowly, but chances pass too quickly. Luke Skywalker is nearly nineteen, skinny and scrappy and always looking at the stars, imagining what’s out there. Luke Skywalker is not a little girl anymore, but she’s not quite a woman either.

Luke is the daughter of the desert. Aunt Beru tells her sometimes, when they are alone, that the desert loves her children, loves those who care for her. Uncle Owen says the desert is just sand and fairytales. Luke knows there’s more, she feels it in her soul. She asked Old Ben, once, when she caught him in town. He said she was a child of the stars more than the sand.

Luke believes that the most. She wants to be in those stars so badly. When the handful of other girls around wanted dolls and dresses like they'd seen from the holofilms where people actually looked happy, she wanted toy ships and piloting lessons. Uncle Owen never was too happy with that. Nobody was. The Imperial recruiter who talked Biggs and Tank into leaving had laughed in her face and told her the Empire didn't need little girls to be pilots. She’d thought about trying to disguise herself as a boy: chop her blonde hair short, take advantage of her gangly, unfeminine frame and her name... Biggs talked her out of it at Aunt Beru’s behest with horror stories of shared showers and armor-less drills. He promised her that when he’d climbed the ranks a little he’d find a way to help her off-world.

There isn’t much for a girl on Tatooine. The Hutts and gangsters had figured out a long time ago that if the boys all left this dead rock or died in their skirmishes then, if a girl couldn’t inherit, they could seize more property. Of course they made it law. Luke was born free, she has the papers to prove it, always tucked into a pocket on her belt. She is free, her aunt and uncle are free, but nobody ever lets her forget that she wouldn’t have to look far to find out her fate could have been different. Uncle Owen tells her all the time that when he dies if she’s not quick and clever and careful, she’ll be a slave again before she knows it. He shouted at Biggs for an hour when he came to say good-bye; said if he actually gave a damn about her he’d stay and marry her instead of flying off with a cheap promise to come back for her. Uncle Owen means well, but Luke knows she wouldn’t survive the desert as some farmer’s wife. She’d be like Missus Tu and just head the call of the Mother and wander into the Wastes until the heat and sand erased her completely.

And so Luke Skywalker is a not-girl not-woman without a past to speak of or a future to hope for. She simply is. She wakes in the morning hoping the last 19 years were a dream, and that she is somewhere beautiful, that her Conga and Cokha are down the hall. But it isn’t a dream and there’s always work to do; she does a double load, the tasks of a son and of a daughter, and hates them both. At the end of the day she stares at the setting suns and thinks about her father who nobody talks about, who left this dust ball, and her grandmother who everyone says she souls be more like, who is buried in the north field.

Luke Skywalker is a girl on the edge of being hurled into adventure, but she doesn’t know it.


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke met her destiny head-on, but it wasn't what she'd seen coming.

Luke had imagined a lot of ways she might leave this dust ball: on her way to the Imperial Flight Academy after blowing away the recruiter, signing on a cargo ship as a pilot or navigator or even a mechanic. She’d even had more fanciful imaginings where her dad was never killed, just held captive all these years by pirates, and finally returned, taking her away from Tatooine and showing her the galaxy. Once, after talking for a while about boys with Camie, she tried to cook up a story about getting swept off her feet by some visiting hotshot who was more handsome and charming than any of the boys she knew. She never got very far on that one, considering she wasn’t too sure what kind of lovey-dovey things anybody would ever say to her.  
All that aside, she had her ideas and her dreams and not a one of them involved a stupid pilot and his flying pile of garbage. At first she thought the Wookie was in charge of the operation, but no such luck. Sure, maybe she didn’t really think she could run an Imperial blockade like he said he could, but there had to be someone else who could! The jump had been a close call anyway. They’d barely made it, and when it was over the stupid pilot had ruffled her hair. She’d punched him in the gut- Biggs would be proud- for it. It made Chewbacca laugh.  
“I still think the ship is a hunk of junk, Ben.”  
The old man gave her a long-suffering look, like the kind her aunt would give her, “It won’t be long, Luke. Alderaan is a beautiful place, you’ll like it. It will be an excellent spot to begin your training.”  
“We can’t begin it now? The princess sounded like she might be in trouble, they might need help when we get there.” Waiting would mean having to sit and think about her lost home, about the end of her childhood, about the charred corpses of the only people who ever, ever loved her because no matter what she might like to pretend, Biggs was never coming back, and her father wasn’t just waiting for a chance to escape pirates, and her mother was buried somewhere so far away nobody even knew. She was all alone, and it was her own fault. She should have offered to repair the first droid when the Jawas came, or not removed the bolt from R2 so they could have just given him to the Stormtroopers. She hated the Empire, sure, but it didn’t matter too much on Tatooine. Was Uncle Owen angry with her when he- Was Aunt Beru scared? Luke fisted the fabric of her poncho in her hands, determined not to cry. If you wanted to survive the desert, you had to save water: you never cried, no matter what the Hutts or the Great Mother took. Especially when you were a girl, especially when everyone was looking for any weakness. Her aunt and uncle taught her that. She knew they didn’t die crying. If they didn’t, she wouldn’t.  
Ben looked at her for a moment, then grew very still and quiet. Behind her claimed spot on the floor she could hear the droids and Chewie arguing over their game. Finally Ben nodded.  
“Alright, young one. First, you should know what the path of a Jedi entails: you will learn philosophy, self-sufficiency, you’ll learn to fight, to fly, to use the Force...”  
In all her life, Luke never imagined leaving home more alone than she’d ever been, on the road to becoming a Jedi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I defy you to tell me Chewbacca doesn't love watching Han get his. This is labelled a two-shot, and for now it is, but if I feel particularly inspired, it may grow some more.

**Author's Note:**

> "Conga" and "Chonka" mean mother and father, but I won't lie to you I have no clue where I got them from anymore. I don't even remember if it's supposed to be Huttesse or not.  
> Anyways, I really enjoyed writing this, especially getting to dig into the culture of a people who live on an entire planet that's just wasteland. 19 is just such a crazy age, too, I think it's a great place to start an adventure story.


End file.
